The present invention relates to an imaging system which generates colorized images, and more particularly to an imaging system in which the colorized images emphasize the distribution of blood flow within a living body.
Imaging systems of the type described herein may be used in various medical applications. One such application may utilize a CT (computed tomography) scanner for the detection of infarctions in the myocardium, or heart tissue. In this application, the CT scanner generates successive images of a person's heart after an injection of an indicator, such as contrast medium, to detect the amount of indicator, and hence the distribution of blood present during each successive scan. The images produced are black and white, with the gray-level intensity being generally proportional to the amount of indicator present. By comparing the successive images, general information concerning blood flow can be obtained. For example, areas of the image that did not change in gray-level intensity would indicate that there was no change in blood flow.
However, the analysis of multiple gray-level images is laborious and time consuming. Also, due to the difficulty in discerning subtle differences in close shades of gray, it may be difficult to derive meaningful information from the images produced by the CT scanner.